Former physicist advocates action that leads to reform

PROFILE: JULIAN ASSANGE is no doubt self-consciously an individual

PROFILE:JULIAN ASSANGE is no doubt self-consciously an individual. He thinks in his own way, primarily as a physicist, having studied pure maths and physics at university in Australia where he grew up.

So, for example, explaining his decision to found Wikileaks, he starts with his interest in the physics of a small release of energy triggering a much larger release; asks what small actions might release energy for “just reform”; identifies the role of information and observes the restriction on the amount of information flowing into the system; and sees Wikileaks as a mechanism “to maximise the flow of information to maximise the amount of action leading to just reform”.

He acts in his own way. Other people carry laptop computers; he carries a desktop machine in a rucksack. He will stay up all night, fingers flittering across the keyboard, and then crash out fully clothed in the nearest chair when everybody else is getting up.

Assange is interested in “doing things that are not trivial or meaningless – making the most of your time”.

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As founder of Wikileaks, he reckons he is genetically predisposed to rebel. His parents met at a demonstration against the Vietnam war. His father, a lover of motorbikes who became an architect, taught him that “a generous, capable man protects victims and doesn’t create them”.

His mother, as a teenager, rode her horse into city hall to protest against the closing of pony trails, and later took off on a motorbike for Sydney where she survived as a painter, actor and artist’s model.

Assange’s whole lifestyle is independent. At the age of 39, he has no home. Carrying his computer and a second rucksack with clothes, he moves wherever the cause takes him .

In his late teens, he says he was part of the computer underground, working on early versions of the internet, hacking into e-mail of the elite.

An attempt to settle down to life as a university physicist ended, he says, when he discovered academic mathematicians and physicists were selling their discipline to military and intelligence agencies. He denounced them in a paper, On the Take and Loving It,and set out to create a website as uncompromising as himself.– (Guardian service)